Is there any point in hiding, then? Not really.
Chapter 18
“…OR ‘TO DO WHAT LIES WITHIN MY POWER’”?
It is no good inflating our conceptions beyond imaginable space; we only bring forth atoms compared to the reality of things. Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest perceptible mark of God’s omnipotence that our imagination should lose itself in that thought.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
When Teresa’s Dominican confessor, García de Toledo, asked her in 1565 to complete the second draft of the Book of Her Life, the author replied that since she had had no time to re-read it, he must feel free to proceed “by tearing up what appears to you to be bad”; meanwhile she would “do what lies within my power” (hacer lo que es en mí).
I ask you to correct it and have it transcribed if it is to be brought to Padre Maestro Ávila, for it could happen that someone might recognize my handwriting. I urgently desire that he be asked for his opinion about it, since this was my intention in beginning to write. If it seems to him I am walking on a good path, I shall be very consoled; then nothing else would remain for me than to do what lies within my power. Nevertheless, do what you think best, and remember you are obliged to one who has so entrusted her soul to you.1
Later, she wrote: “For if they [women] do what lies in their power [si ellas hacen lo que es en sí], the Lord will make them so strong [manly: varoniles] that they will astonish men.”2
This concern to be faithful to “what is in her power” or, more literally, to “what is within,” evolved with maturity into the “center of our soul,” an immutable “certainty,” a “peace” that persists through “war, trial, and fatigue.”3 At that moment, though, her fidelity was strained by fear of betrayal: “As for what I say from here on, I do not give this permission [to Toledo and other confessors]; nor do I desire, if they should show it to someone, that they tell who it is who has experienced these things, or who has written this. As a result, I will not mention my name or the name of anyone else, but I will write everything as best I can to remain unknown.”4
And yet, the feeling she had of having begun a new life did nothing but grow. It dated from her re-conversion, of course, and was reinforced by the act of writing itself, which “freed” her from herself and made her a subject of the Other—in times to come, and in the time of others.
I now want to return to where I left off about my life, for I think I delayed more than I should have so that what follows would be better understood. This is another, new book from here on—I mean another, new life. The life dealt with up to this point was mine; the one I lived from the point where I began to explain those things about prayer is the one God lived in me—according to the way it appears to me—because I think it would be impossible in so short a time to get rid of so many bad habits and deeds. May the Lord be praised who freed me from myself [que me liberó de mí].5
The first draft of the Life being lost, all we have is the one written between 1563 and 1565 for the Dominicans García de Toledo and Pedro Ibáñez, and with the blessing of Francisco de Soto Salazar, her Inquisitor friend (believe it or not); Salazar also urged her to send a copy to Juan de Ávila. The Inquisition was naturally packed with skillful diplomats and subtle theologians…Three years later, in April 1568, despite the misgivings of Fr. Domingo Báñez, who was reluctant to let the book stray beyond a restricted circle, Teresa finally sent her autobiography to Juan de Ávila by the intermediary of her good friend Luisa de la Cerda.
Much later, in 1574, the Grand Inquisitor Cardinal Gaspar de Quiroga opened a copy of the same book with great interest. He had received it from the princess of Eboli, who had borne a grudge against La Madre ever since her spoilt ways had gotten her expelled from the Pastrana convent. This act of revenge misfired: the “Great Angel,” as Teresa dubbed him, told Luisa de la Cerda of his admiration for the writer. Six years later, in 1580, when Teresa’s reforms were beginning to prevail and she called on Quiroga for permission to found a Carmelite community in Madrid, he confirmed his appreciation of the book. However, the manuscript was not to leave the precincts of the Holy Office until 1588, when her executors Ana de Jesús and Luis de León retrieved it for publication purposes.
However subjective, the Truth the nun sought to transmit by articulating her own small truth turned out to be highly shareable, and shared it was. Teresa was thrilled to discover that García de Toledo had actually had his own religious experience of the states she described. Pedro Ibáñez, too, the alert, faithful companion of her mystical experience as much as of her projects for reform, was to retire to a contemplative Dominican monastery. Domingo Báñez, Teresa’s confessor and director of conscience during the years of writing the memoir (1562–1568), lecturer in theology at Saint Thomas of Avila, professor at Salamanca, and consultant to the Inquisition in Valladolid, tried to impress on her that she should not confuse God’s action in her with her own action in His name, for each was “complete in its way.” Speaking as a witness for Teresa during her beatification proceedings in 1592, Báñez declared that mysticism and theology, the desire for God and the knowledge of God, albeit two distinct things, came together in her. Was the truth according to Teresa on the way to becoming the truth, validated as such by the highest echelons of the Church?
The unstinting support of the Dominicans did not prevent La Madre from expressing her gratitude to the Jesuits.
Since His Majesty desired now to enlighten me so that I might no longer offend Him and might know my great debt to Him, this fear increased in such a way that it made me diligently seek out spiritual persons to consult. I had already heard about some, because they had come to this town and were members of the Society of Jesus, of which—without knowing any of the members—I was extremely fond, only from hearing about the mode of life and prayer they followed. But I didn’t feel worthy to speak to them or strong enough to obey them, and this made me more fearful; it would have been a difficult thing for me to converse with them and yet be what I was.6
And again: “I have been reared in, and given being, as they say, by the Society.”7
In the highly competitive wasps’ nest that was religious life under the eye of the Inquisition, every support was precious; the inner book had great need of it, and so did the books to come. Teresa, with unbeatable pragmatism, made sure of surrounding herself with every “network” in sight to fend off the suspicions, calumnies, and persecutions that were a perennial feature of her life. But if these powerful shields kept her safe from the Inquisition, a more important factor was the intimate persuasion that acted like the magical spring of her pragmatism: she was convinced of having attained and incorporated the Absolute, the “centella de seguridad,” even if only intermittently.
The sun is blazing hot this afternoon, my traveling companions are sated with sightseeing and running out of speculations about the terrorist attacks in London. Andrew has been reduced to leafing through Teresa’s letters (volume 2 of my French edition of her Complete Works), while lending half an ear to my expoundings. As usual he only wants to be contrary, and now he pounces, with an evil grin.
“So Teresa only made it into odor of sanctity because she turned her neurosis around by barricading herself behind a demented exultation?” He doesn’t pull his punches.
My friend is too impatient to discern the nuances of the multihued biography I am trying to refashion, in my fashion, of my roommate, or to explore her kaleidoscopic frames of mind. Otherwise he would have seen how in the icy furnace of Teresa’s psychic life, the traps of paranoid delusions of grandeur were dismantled one by one, step by step, finding compensation elsewhere. This came about thanks, firstly, to the woman’s humility, real or feigned, revealed by her many depressive doubts and by that quickness to berate herself in which masochism vied with irony. But it was no less due to the more or less friendly harshness, the more or less harsh friendship, of her spiritual guides. Lastly and above al
l, it was due to writing, her indefatigable lookout by night and by day; the writing she did not neglect from the 1560s onward, with or without the input of ecstasy. Thus contained behind a triple security barrier, her raptures restored her to health and the pleasures of hard work. The Carmelite mystic was reborn as a businesswoman.
“Andrew, listen to me.” I’m groping for clincher arguments to awaken my wayward American to the benefits of heeding a long-dead Catholic saint; no easy task, in all the rawness of that fundamentalist outrage in London. “Look, Teresa knows that this ‘living water’ she’s submerged in, to drowning point, and I’m talking about depression inverted into stimulation by way of comatose states and epileptic auras—so, this living water is called desire. She knows that ecstasy is a disconnect that interrupts that unbearable arousal and transforms it into jouissance, a rejoicing in self-abandon, relaxation, a therapy-jouissance. That’s her weapon against the deadly violence of desire. How do I know? Listen to this,” and I pick up volume 1 of the Complete Works. “Here, Way of Perfection, chapter 19, section eight. ‘The love of God and the desire for Him can increase so much that the natural subject is unable to endure it, and so there have been persons who have died from love.’ That’s what she says! The fact that the desire is for God doesn’t alter the fact that it’s desire. Real desire, whose object is nowhere, the objectless kind—you know the sort, as well as I do. The divine aspect only makes it greater. She goes on: ‘I know of one’—she often uses that formula to talk about herself—‘who would have died if God hadn’t succored her immediately with such an abundance of this living water, for she was almost carried out of herself with raptures. I say that she was almost carried out of herself because in this water the soul finds rest.’8 So, are you listening, Teresa is the vessel and God is the glassmaker who blows it into the shape he wants, but also the man who fills the vase as he pleases. This coupling, whose sexual symbolism surely hasn’t escaped you, is analyzed by Teresa in all its ambiguity. Pain and sweetness, nourishment and penitence, dissembling and longing—divine perfection meets human imperfection, in short. Teresa analyzes herself in the language of the Gospels, but once she inserts this into a semi-novelized introspection, it becomes a prefiguration of psychoanalysis. Well, yes, I take that as a compliment, it’s an occupational hazard! Here’s more, a bit farther on.
“‘However great the abundance of this water He gives, there cannot be too much in anything of His. If He gives a great deal, He gives the soul, as I said, the capacity to drink much; like a glassmaker who makes a vessel a size he sees is necessary in order to hold what he intends to pour into it.
“‘In desiring this water there is always some fault, since the desire comes from ourselves; if some good comes, it comes from the Lord who helps. But we are so indiscreet that since the pain is sweet and delightful, we never think we can have enough of this pain. We eat without measure, we foster this desire as much as we can, and so sometimes it kills.…I say that anyone who reaches the experience of this thirst that is so impelling should be very careful, because I believe he will have this temptation. And although he may not die of thirst, his health will be lost and he will give external manifestations of this thirst, even though he may not want to; these manifestations should be avoided at all costs.’”
While “mortal life” makes her breathless with desire and this asphyxia horrifies our nun, the desire to possess the ideal Father comes to her rescue once again, giving her another enjoyment to savor. This one, unlike desire, is not deadly, for sensual plenitude is here relieved by being ideally transferred onto the amorous ideality of Man. Some (in Lacan’s line, as we’ve seen) think today that this “other jouissance” is accessible only to women. Others contest this. There are writers, for example, male to all intents and purposes, who are not so far from opening up to it, from expressing it, and more.
Andrew looks skeptical—just to annoy me, I guess. I give up, and resume the discussion with Teresa: It’s easy, she exists but doesn’t answer. Like God. “Like my father,” said Paul, my favorite patient.
By contrast with the average suicide bomber, you believe, Teresa, that the celestial glassmaker formed you as a vessel whose size is commensurate with what He wishes to pour into it. Loving as He is, and albeit flattered by your penances and mortifications, He will not summon you to die, let alone to blow yourself up. Your mating is thus so divinely tuned that the water He provides will never be too much, even though you sometimes drink an awful lot of it, don’t you, Teresa! The female “vessel,” mouth agape, hollow-bodied, is begging to be filled, for your desires are still childishly, archaically oral, I’ve told you before. Your arousal calls for food, nourishment without end. Alternating bitter grief with sweetness, you are “so indiscreet” as to castigate yourself relentlessly, my black-browed Teresa, you can never have enough, your voracity (or frigidity?) is unassailable, you were made for dying of desire. And would that be a blessed death, or a stratagem of the devil? Good question, and one that your various mortifications, succumbing to the same demonic impetus as your pleasures of the mouth, are not about to answer!
You are no longer fighting anorexia but its flip side, the secret, untold cause of many anorexic or bulimic behaviors: the “desire that kills,” unquenchable thirst, the avidity you feel as an empty female vessel. In this battle you are your own best doctor, a complicated one you’ll admit, downright dangerous at times, but as effective as most other medics. When you were writing that chapter 19 of the Way, you thought that “losing your health” was to be “avoided at all costs.” You’d learned the futility of trying to conceal the symptoms, “for we will be unable to hide everything we would like to hide.” Not only because it’s God’s love that wills all this, but also because “our nature at times can be as much at work as the love.” Something of an Illuminata, certainly, but no less a woman of the Renaissance, you are aware, my searching Teresa, unschooled as you claim to be, of the role of human nature as an adjunct to God’s: “There are persons who will vehemently desire anything, even if it is bad.”9 To whom do you refer? Do you know these persons from the inside, as you know yourself? Suppose you do. What then? Should these persons be penalized? Should their vehemence be brought within limits?
Not at all. You have come to a different answer, which I imagine you trying out on Francisco de Borja in an effort, no doubt successful, to convince him. He sums it up.
“In short, you are seized, like Paul, by a strong desire to live a bodily life while at the same time longing to be delivered of the prison of the body in order to be united with God.” This former grandee of Spain, duke of Gandía and marquis of Lombay, titles he has renounced by joining the Jesuits, could never be called unschooled. He quotes from the letter of Saint Paul to the Philippians, which he knows by heart: “For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better: nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful…”10 Borja is a man of the world. He does not preach, so much as rely on the easy charms of conversation.
“And the pain of it can be so dreadful that it almost takes away one’s reason, Father.” You enter into the game at once, introducing a little story, novelistic Teresa. “Not long ago, I saw a person in this affliction. She was in such great pain, and made such an effort to conceal it, that she was deranged for a while. Yes, quite delirious.” Your diagnosis is correct, Teresa; you fear for your own reason.
The Jesuit grandee smiles in silence, glad to note that the authorization he gave you to continue in the practice of prayer was not taken lightly: you keep a scrupulous eye on your own progress. But he never expected you to outwit him at the game of casuistry.
“For my part I don’t believe it is a matter of cutting off desire, only of moderating it.” What a finely poised performance as a moralist, prefiguring those of the eighteenth century, my mutant Teresa! “That’s right, it’s good to create diversions, and I do mean diversions: to divert desire. To transmute it, if you like, by the power of thought (que mude el
deseo pensando).11 Don’t you agree, Father?” You desire in thinking, Teresa, you are a thinker of desire. Could Borja have been one of the first to notice?
For three years, from 1555 to 1558, you borrowed your friend Guiomar de Ulloa’s confessor, Fr. Juan de Prádanos. Your soul, you wrote later, was not strong but very fragile, “especially with regard to giving up some friendships I had. Although I was not offending God by them, I was very attached.” To Prádanos, as to the friends he was warning you from, you were “very attached, and it seemed to me it would be ingratitude to abandon them.” How well I understand you! Prádanos was not so distant from your substantial states and words, he did not forbid anything, he simply abandoned you to…God. Were you expecting it? Between these two father figures, human and divine, came “the first time the Lord granted me this favor of rapture.” The long-awaited moment of “mystical nuptials” has arrived, it is Pentecost 1556, you are forty-one years of age. “I heard these words: ‘No longer do I want you to converse with men but with angels.’”12 Here is a grace that will reliably protect you from that manly Fr. Prádanos, not yet thirty…but never from his angelic side! Still, that is nothing to guard against, since the Lord Himself enjoins you to converse with his like. Honest as a person and sincere as a writer, you say so fair and square: “These words have been fulfilled, for I have never again been able to tie myself to any friendship or to find consolation in or bear particular love for any other persons than those I understand love Him and strive to serve Him; nor is it in my power to do so.”13 Fortunate Prádanos!
Young Fr. Baltasar Álvarez, also a Jesuit, stepped in to help you draw up the constitution and rules for discalced nuns. From 1562 to 1565, he was your confidant in Avila before being appointed rector at Medina del Campo. “I had a confessor who mortified me very much and was sometimes an affliction and great trial to me because he disturbed me exceedingly, and he was the one who profited me the most as far as I can tell”;14 “I knew that they told him to be careful of me, and that he shouldn’t let the devil deceive him by anything I told him.”15 But shouldn’t so solemn a letrado follow you with ecstatic transports of his own? You write: “I saw some of the wonderful favors the Lord bestowed on the rector of the Society of Jesus whom I have mentioned…Once a severe trial came upon him in which he was very persecuted and found himself in deep affliction.”16 Is this a reference to Fr. Álvarez, as Fr. Gratian notes in the margin, and as Fr. Larrañaga believes? Or is it to Gaspar de Salazar?17 Later on, a few months before the death of Baltasar Álvarez, you sound a more personal note, writing to Isabel Osorio: “You should know that he is one of my best friends. He was my confessor for some years.…He is a saint.”18 Finally, a year before your own death, you write sadly from Palencia: “Nonetheless, regarding matters of the soul, I feel alone, for there is no one here that I know from the Society. Truly, I feel alone everywhere, because before, even when our saint was far away, it seems he was a companion to me, because he still communicated with me through letters. Well, we are in exile, and it is good that we feel this life to be one.”19 He must have been pretty special.
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